Beyond the Cautionary Tale: Navigating Current Conflict with the Help of Forward-looking Storytelling

Conflict storytelling is often attributed a primarily retrospective function that derives its appeal from the assumption that learning about the past means learning from the past and thus enables us to prevent similar crises from ever happening again. These lessons, however, come at a considerable cost, for they presuppose the occurrence of conflicts that, rather than becoming the subjects of stories that we can then learn from, should ideally have been avoided in the first place. This workshop highlights forms of conflict storytelling that are preventive rather than reactive, that prioritize looking forward over looking backward, and that can equip us with the tools to navigate conflict in real time.